TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

17 participants
6470 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of. -- Dave

6 years, 1 month

Early DNS software

by Witold Krecicki

Hello, I'm looking for old DNS software - servers, clients, libraries. The oldest one I've found is BIND 4.3 from 4.3BSD (and it works as a resolver on 2019 Internet), but there were earlier ones - http://www.donelan.com/dnstimeline.html says that UCB released first BIND in 1985, something was running on earlier servers. Any help would be appreciated. Witold Krecicki

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] [patch] do not strip mdoc macros

by Doug McIlroy

>> But sed, awk, perl, python, ... lex and parse once into an AST or >> bytecode, removing the recurring cost of comments, etc. that impact >> groff. So I don't think it's an even comparison. > > Of course it's a valid comparison. Which sed or awk or shell script is > distributed in a stripped/compressed form? Do they store their AST > somewhere, so as to avoid recompilation? They do not. Just as > with groff, every parse starts anew. Comments inside of a macro definition get scanned each time it's called. This justifies the first paragraph above. In the wild, almost all comments occur outside macro definitions. This justifies the second. Thus comments are harmless in practice. Doug

6 years, 1 month

Bell Labs data center in 1969/70.

by Dan Cross

TUHS related due to the BTL connection. This came across a mailing list at work today (as a, "hey, this is cool!" thing; nothing work related) and I thought some on this list might be interested. http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/album/index.html - Dan C.

6 years, 1 month

P J Plauger in popular culture

by Tony Finch

An amusing Unix-related snippet from a science fiction site: https://www.tor.com/2019/03/12/more-please-authors-we-wish-would-publish-mo… > Back when the world was young and a ten megabyte hard drive required a team of six sturdy workers to move, P. J. Plauger quite reliably delivered to the world a story or so per year—memorable tales like “Wet Blanket” and “Child of All Ages,” stories that won him a Campbell for Best New Writer and a Hugo nomination for Best Short Story. Tragedy struck when he was enticed away from science fiction by the seedy world of Unix, which offered its arcane practitioners unnecessary luxuries like indoor living, food, and even health care. (The rest of the page is not relevant to this list) Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot(a)dotat.at> http://dotat.at

6 years, 1 month

Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago

by Rudi Blom

>A bit off topic (sorry) but wondering about that PDF conversion. This >may be a dumb question but did you ever try the PDF conversion in >calibre ( https://calibre-ebook.com )? To answer my own question. Yes, that was a dumb question. I completely over looked the 'image' in Nelson's post >The result is a >searchable document, with a single page image per PDF page, rather >than the mixed bitmap scan of 1-up and 2-up pages in the original PDF >file. Calibre's PDF to whatever conversion doesn't do anything worthwhile with images.

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

The posting of the link http://bitsavers.org/pdf/regnecentralen/RC_4000_Reference_Manual_Jun69.pdf brought back old memories. When I moved to Aarhus University in Denmark in December 1973, I found that the Department of Chemistry where I worked had a Regnecentralen RC-4000 minicomputer with paper tape input that was used to manage the department's accounting. It had a dedicated operator who kept in running nicely until at least after I left in 1977. It had too little physical memory to be considered practical for the quantum chemistry work that I was then engaged in, and may not even have had a Fortran compiler; instead, we used the campus CDC 6400 for our research. In memory of the RC-4000, and Per Brinch Hansen's (13 Nov 1938--31-Jul-2007) many contributions to the literature of computer science, programming language design, and parallel computing, I prepared an enhancement of its manual, available here: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/RC-4000/ The Web page that comes up gives a directory of the available files, and documents the steps needed to produce them. The result is a searchable document, with a single page image per PDF page, rather than the mixed bitmap scan of 1-up and 2-up pages in the original PDF file. Despite my 40+ year engagement in the TeX community, I only recently learned via the texhax mailing of some PDFTeX internals that allow one to construct a file that can retypeset n-up files into 1-up format. I therefore make this posting in the hope that someone else might be encouraged to tackle similar document improvements in the bitsavers archives. Although it takes a bit of experimentation, with the exception of the OCR conversion, the entire operation can be done with free software on pretty much any modern computing platform, thanks to the portability of the needed software. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

6 years, 1 month

Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago

by Rudi Blom

>Date: Sat, 9 Mar 2019 15:29:11 -0700 >From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe(a)math.utah.edu> >To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Subject: Re: [TUHS] Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago >Message-ID: <CMM.0.95.0.1552170551.beebe(a)gamma.math.utah.edu> ... snip ... > http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/RC-4000/ > >The Web page that comes up gives a directory of the available files, >and documents the steps needed to produce them. The result is a >searchable document, with a single page image per PDF page, rather >than the mixed bitmap scan of 1-up and 2-up pages in the original PDF >file. >Despite my 40+ year engagement in the TeX community, I only recently >learned via the texhax mailing of some PDFTeX internals that allow one >to construct a file that can retypeset n-up files into 1-up format. > >I therefore make this posting in the hope that someone else might be >encouraged to tackle similar document improvements in the bitsavers. >archives. Although it takes a bit of experimentation, with the >exception of the OCR conversion, the entire operation can be done with >free software on pretty much any modern computing platform, thanks to >the portability of the needed software. A bit off topic (sorry) but wondering about that PDF conversion. This may be a dumb question but did you ever try the PDF conversion in calibre ( https://calibre-ebook.com )? I like the PDF to htmlz conversion even if mostly the result still needs (a lot of) extra work. Cheers, uncle rubl

6 years, 1 month

Re: [TUHS] Failing Memory of an Algol Based System from years ago

by Doug McIlroy

Clem, I think the "Algol machine" you have in mind is the RC-2000 (not quite sure of the designation--could look it up in the attic if it matters) designed by Per Brinch Hansen for Regencentralen (again, the name may not be quite right). The manual used Algol as a hardware description language. The instruction set was not unusual. It has come up before in TUHS. I have the manual if you need more info. Doug

6 years, 1 month

sticky tapes

by Steve Simon

i have worked in tv, developing systems for archive restoration for many years. if you have valuable sticky tapes i suggest you try and contact a lical video archivist, there are other tricks than just baking that can help - old tapes can present complex problems. <story> there was a sticky valuable rolling stones 24 track master tape i heard of. it was sent for analysis, and they discovered the stickiness was “vodka and coke” :-). </story> -Steve

6 years, 1 month

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